Digital Travel Blog for HIS 344 (Recent Europe)

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In this article titled “Shocking:” Greenland Ice Melt: Global Warming or Just Heat Wave?, and published on the “National Geographic News” website in July of 2012, the topic is the disturbingly rapidly melting ice sheets in Greenland. Despite the first fingers pointing blame were directed towards global warming, scientists believe that these rapid melts may actually occur naturally every 150 years or so. However another concern then would be that should these melts become common, it would add to the problem of rising sea levels. This melt was so dramatic that even Greenland’s coldest and highest place, Summit Station, was affected, something which “hasn’t occurred during our lifetime.” Yet this is where some scientists claim support to their idea of these melting events occurring every 150 years, as there is evidence that this has happened at Summit Station previously in 1889. The problem is that if melts continue to happen more often, the newly melted water shall not be absorbed by the surrounding snow, as there shall not be much there to do the job, hence leading to a rise in sea levels. Whether it is global warming or simply a heat wave has been researched around the world, although the answer shall remain unclear for now.

“The Magic Lantern” is a book written by Timothy Garth Ash, in which he discusses various events in Eastern Europe during their separation from the Soviet Union and the end of communism. Similar to Mak, Ash writes in a manner that is coincided with his travels, although Ash is present for almost all of the key points of his book, whereas Mak tends to travel in the present and talk with witnesses of past events. Ash begins his book in Poland, where there is what he calls a “refolution”-combination of revolution and reform- going on. In Poland, the people were fighting for Solidarity. This is brought about through the means of the first “free vote” in Poland. In the end, the quest for Solidarity ends up succeeding. The “refolution” in neighboring Hungary was based on a reburial of Imre Nagy, who had been executed by Stalinists. A similarity between the two countries was that their economic situations worsened rather than improved due to the “refolutions.” The next part highlights Berlin and the connection between the countries in Eastern Europe and how what occurs in one place may affect another. When the “iron curtain” falls, which had separated Hungary from Austria, people from East Germany use this route as a means to escape to the other side, often being encouraged to do so. The chapter ends with the union of East and West Germany and the joy of its people to once again be a united Germany. The last country discussed is Czechoslovakia, with the focus of the chapter being on the “Magic Lantern,” which contains the meeting room in which the plans for the revolution are taking place. Ash ends his book by discussing the “death of communism” in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ending the book with a quote by Orwell, “All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure,” remarking that “This one was the exception. But that is because it was unlike all earlier revolutions.”